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Ed Morrissey brings a chart comparing incomes in the country to those in DC. It is a graphic illustration of how DC’s rent seekers have become even more accomplished parasites.
Which part of the country is getting richer the fastest? That might seem like a strange question in the middle of a four-year economic stagnation. Chronic unemployment continues, and the American workforce participation rate remains at 35-year lows.
The US economy has not added more than 250,000 jobs in a month since February, and only twice since February 2012. Nearly a million people (932,000) left the workforce in last month’s jobs report, and over 3 million in the past year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Household Survey. Economic growth remains mired in the 2-3 percent range, with incremental gains giving way almost immediately to incremental setbacks.
That doesn’t mean that everyone is sharing the pain equally, however. The Washington Post reported this week that the nation’s fastest-growing center of wealth and privilege can be found right in the nation’s capital – WashingtonD.C. Who are the nouveau riche? “The former bureaucrats, accountants and staff officers … the lawyers, lobbyists and executives who work for companies that barely had a presence in Washington before the boom.”
What boom? It’s not an economic boom, but a deluge of federal spending that “transformed the culture of a once staid capital and created a new wave of well-heeled insiders.” In other words, the “boom” is in part a transfer of wealth through taxation from everywhere else in the nation to the capital, and in part a borrowing spree that fuels federal spending and the lobbying and consulting industries that both benefit from it and bend it to their own interests – at the expense of economic growth everywhere else.
This trend has proceeded for some time. A chart from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis shows the dramatic gap that has opened up between WashingtonD.C. and the rest of the country in median household income.
Daniel Henninger says there is something in DC worse than the healthcare mess.
The ObamaCare train wreck is plowing through the White House in super slow-mo on screens everywhere, splintering reputations and presidential approval ratings. Audiences watch popeyed as Democrats in distress like Senators Kay Hagan, Mary Landrieu and Mark Pryor decide whether to cling to the driverless train or jump toward the tall weeds. The heartless compilers of the Washington Post/ABC poll asked people to pick a head-to-head matchup now between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Mitt won. This is the most amazing spectacle of mayhem and meltdown anyone has seen in politics since Watergate.
No question, it’s tough on Barack Obama. But what about the rest of us? For many Americans, the Obama leadership meltdown began five years ago.
In fall 2008, the U.S. suffered its worst financial crisis since the Depression. That wasn’t Barack Obama’s fault. But five years on, in the fall of 2013, the country’s economy is still sick.
Unemployed middle-aged men look in the mirror and see someone who may never work again. Young married couples who should be on the way up are living in their parents’ basement. Many young black men (official unemployment rate 28%; unofficial rate off the charts) have no prospect of work.
Washington these days kvetches a lot about what Healthcare.gov is doing to the Obama “legacy.” Far worse than ObamaCare, though, is that the 44th president in his second term presides over a great nation that is punching so far below its weight that large swaths of its people have lost heart. …
John Crudele follows up on last week’s NY Post story about the possible manipulation of employment data before the last election.
Let me be the first to ask: Did the White House know that employment reports were being falsified?
Last week I reported exclusively that someone at the Census Bureau’s Philadelphia region had been screwing around with employment data. And that person, after he was caught in 2010, claimed he was told to do so by a supervisor two levels up the chain of command.
On top of that, a reliable source whom I haven’t identified said the falsification of employment data by Census was widespread and ongoing, especially around the time of the 2012 election.
There’s now a congressional investigation of how Census handles employment data. And we can hope that we’ll find out this was just an isolated incident.
But let me tell you why it might not be.
Back in 2009 — right before the 2010 census of the nation was taken — there was an announcement that the Obama administration had decided that the Census Bureau would report to senior White House aides.
The rumor was that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was in charge of the nationwide head count. …
Paul Mirengoff of Power Line sees some good news in the Dems judicial power grab.
… On balance, I consider this a good thing. Why? Because much of the important stuff that federal appeals courts do is, indeed, politics by other means, and the public needs to understand this. The more that federal judges lose their mystique, the more that realism is enhanced. The more that judicial decisions in important controversial cases are understood as ideologically driven, the better.
Not every federal appellate judge is an ideologue in a robe. Chief Justice Roberts wasn’t when he broke with his non-liberal brethren and upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare’s individual mandate, although he may have had politics on his mind. A few conservative judges on lower courts had upheld the mandate too.
Obama’s nakedly ideological use of the federal judiciary won’t turn every judge into a naked ideologue. But it may, and should, color their approach to particular cases. For example, it may cause the five non-liberal judges on the Supreme Court more actively to scrutinize the work of the D.C. Circuit, especially the work of Judges Millett, Pollard, and Wilkins.
A heavy dose of reality won’t just help the public; it may also benefit some judges.
To be clear, I don’t celebrate the fact that law has become a subdivision of partisan politics. I just think it’s a good thing that this reality is being exposed.
John Podhoretz says this time the president will not get away with failure.
People are puzzled: Why would Barack Obama have lied about how wonderfully everything was going to go with ObamaCare when officials in his administration knew perfectly well that disaster was going to strike?
In one sense, the answer is simple: At the time, just before Oct. 1, Republicans were insisting ObamaCare be delayed or defunded. The president and his team weren’t going to give the enemy the satisfaction of agreeing — or the potent ammunition that would have come from a rueful admission the system wasn’t ready.
Today, a bipartisan agreement to delay ObamaCare seems like it would have been a pretty good deal. It didn’t look that way at all in the last two weeks of September.
But there’s a deeper reason he and his people lied: They did it because they could. They did it because nearly five years in the White House had given Obama and his team confidence they would not face the music and they could finesse the problems until they got fixed. …
… As a result, Barack Obama and his administration have said what they felt they needed to say and done what they felt they needed to do for immediate political gain. They did so this time. But this time was different, because this time he was mishandling and discrediting the great liberal desideratum of our time — a national health-care system.
This time he hasn’t gotten away with it.
And Victor Davis Hanson says this was the tenth life.
An Obamcat administration is given nine, but not ten, lives:
1) The dismal economy
2) Guantanamo, renditions, and tribunals that were to be relegated to the Bush-Cheney ash heap
3) Fast and Furious
4) The “lead from behind” fiasco in Libya
5) Benghazi
6) The AP monitoring
7) The Syrian flip-flop-flip embarrassment
8) The NSA scandal
9) Lois Lerner’s IRSThe tenth, and one too many, was Obamacare . . .
WaPo blog says the rank and file IRS folks are fuming at Lois Lerner.
A top manager from the Internal Revenue Service’s Cincinnati office was “furious” last May over allegations from Lois Lerner that “front-line” employees were responsible for the agency’s inappropriate actions toward conservative groups, according to e-mails from a former top official with the division.
Lerner, who headed the exempt-organizations office in Washington, D.C., blamed rank-and-file workers for the agency’s behavior during a legal conference in which she apologized on behalf of the IRS. She said actions were misguided efforts by workers to deal with a flood of applications from tax-exemption applicants during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles.
Cynthia Thomas, a former manager with the IRS’s exempt-organizations office in Cincinnati, fired off an e-mail to Lerner after the conference, complaining that the agency had blamed rank-and-file employees for its actions. …